Water Quality and Fisheries Summary

Chairman of LCO: A need to develop baseline data for comprehensive ecosystem services – flora, fauna, wetland, etc. on ceded territories. Some data may exist, but there isn't an existing database with all that information. So many sources – state, federal, university, tribal, GLIFWC.

Chairman Wiggins: What you do to the land, you do to yourself. What's missing: the entity that will act as the digester for all the information and facilitating partnerships (potentially Nelson Institute?) Cumulative impacts should be able to be viewed in real-time. Example: Bad River watershed as the center of methodological approach.

Vice Chairman of Red Cliff: How do we determine fisheries health? Commercial vs. subsistence fishing; identify point and non-point sources of pollution – and what are those ties to human health? (Lake Superior: mercury, PCB, toxins) – how much is legacy? What can we do to create goals to reduce toxins?

Integrative capacity-building
Example: Bringing teachers and scientists from UW-Madison to bear on water quality-related issues

Youth Outreach
Example: Tribal youth partnership with tribal resource management departments beginning in middle-school but also including high school and undergraduate students to work collaboratively across tribal communities

Map & identify point-source pollution in Great Lakes region

Importance of telling a story about a place – use stories to organize data.

Short-term plans (2 months out)

Develop curriculum to share across tribes, especially with middle school students.

Online training component for tribal staff?

Mid-term plans (6 months out)

Online training component for tribal staff – given distances for tribes in the region, the UW could assist with training tribal staff and facilitating discussions (e.g. MOOC on groundwater modeling, etc.) – without having to be enrolled as a fulltime student. Focused to tribal staff and members – tailored to tribal needs that would tell the story of tribal natural resources management, and then build from there. Division of Continuing Studies does have an infrastructure in place.

Idea: Develop a program that took 5 high school or college students from each tribe, and teach them about what different reservations know about water quality – and then they could do water quality testing, provide outreach, etc.